The Project Project

This doesn’t really need its own project but as around half of the models were sitting in the backlog, this feels like the most sensible place to put them. Sort of an unfinished project. Though the original started on my old profile here.

Between re-watching Dredd for the hundred billionth time and PIGMOO’s project, I fancy playing through a Judge Dredd campaign solo. When I checked, I was short some models and some scatter terrain. I also needed to sort out a proper storage for them as they were mixed in with other sci fi models.

I picked up some of the new Warlord resin models to add into the original Mongoose/Warlord metals from the Kickstarter forever ago. That Warlord resin can get in the bin, I don’t think I’ll be buying more of that. The rest of the models are a mixture of Diehard, Crooked Dice and Bad Squiddo.

The Humble 4L Really Useful Box which I used for the majority of my painted models. Having everything in one place is handy but as this is a collection that I don’t see leaving my home again, I wasn’t fussed about putting magnets on the bases. I grabbed an MDF insert from Warbases which holds 77 x 25mm round bases which should be fine for the vast majority of the models.

A wee half day of painting while watching the Rally, and the robots are done.

• Black prime
• Drybrush with gunmetal
• Pick out bright colours (this is 2000AD afterall) and paint over selected surfaces but not all the way to the edges – this makes them look bright but a bit beat up.

The Foot clan is after a shipment of mutagen, the turtles want to stop them. The shipment has been found on the docks of New York. It’s up to the Turtles to get to it first. The Harbor is a maze of Shipping crates, cranes and industrial materials. The perfect way for the Turtles to stop the Shredder and his minions…

Arriving at the docks, the turtles found the Foot Clan rushing towards several points before they could get their bearings. Bebop shouted that he had found the tablet they had mislaid and Shredder found a small cache of mutagen. Other members of the Foot disappeared into sewer entrances or starting moving towards the ship sitting at dock.

Looking to head off the various groups, the turtles split up. Mikey grabbing another minor shipment, Raph making his way over to the ship and Leo and Donny heading towards the centre of the dockside where the ominous glow emanating from a larger group of barrels had caught their attention.

In typical Foot fashion, two of their crew fell over trip hazards and managed to impale themselves of their own weapons. Before anyone else could do much, a strange Calm (card) came over all those present and everyone found themselves reluctant to hurt anyone. Instead they all just moved cautiously towards one another. Leo got close enough to the big pile of barrels to dominate the space. Raph had a close call nearly tripping face first into a pile of boxes.

Shredder, having lulled everyone into a calm in the previous turn called for his side to unleash hell. The attacks flew fast and perils mounted all over the place though the both sides seemed evenly matched. Bebop did more damage to his own side than the turtles managed.

In the shadow of a shipping container, Donny popped up out of a sewer access and found himself close enough to Shredder to attack. Utterly underestimating his foe’s martial prowess however he found himself knocked out completely as a flurry of blows smacked him upside the head.

The focus was no longer on any shipments or retrieving any clues; this was going to be a fight to the end. Rocksteady and more Foot soldiers lay on the ground but the relentless fighting was beginning to take its toll on the turtles.

The turtles, seeming to snatch the initiative, pushed their slight advantage for the first time. Raph snuck up behind Bebop and knocked him out, grabbing the tablet from his pocket as the mutated warthog crumpled to the ground. Leo, being the lead from the front kind of leader that he is, took on Shredhead solo. He also found himself on his arse as the experienced master fighter bested him with little effort.

As the wail of police sirens came closer, Shredder grabbed the big pile of mutagen canisters and, without looking back to see if any of his followers were behind him, fled into the chaos of containers and the safety of the night. Knowing that they were beaten, the turtles headed into the sewers to tend their wounds, try to gain intelligence from the tablet they found and to store what little of the mutagen they had managed to take in a safe place.

Results: 

Foot clan – 4 VP, 10 ooze units (35 needed to trigger act 2), +1 back up and +1 contact gained

TMNT – 3 VP, 1XP, +1 gear and +1 tip gained.

For note: I’m using the 2nd edition rules and the TMNT expansion was written for the first edition. Thankfully the core rulebook mentions different terms you might see in older scenarios and how they get dealt with in 2e in clear box text.

Wow, that was fun. The game was quick and very little checking of the book felt necessary. Most people have the Bot team play first in a turn to add more challenge to the game and it felt like the right move here for the story too. I’m sure reading through the rules again post-game, I’ll spot some things I got wrong but Pulp Alley did exactly what I wanted it to.

Shredder is an absolute beast. He was the only one rolling d10s and rolled them very well. Pulp Alley uses exploding dice which is how he took Donatello out in a single exchange but he was dominant in every combat he was in.

The solo deck works a little differently from the usual Fortune deck but the turn when Shredder got The Storm card and everyone ended up getting a card pulled (normally just the first three characters to act in a turn draw one) was joyous madness.

I probably won’t manage a game for a few weeks thanks to my working pattern but I’m looking forward to getting to the next one.

.. Shredder is still looking for more Mutagen. The harbour shipment is but one of the many Mutagen raids going on in the City. The turtles and the Foot clan race each other to collect all mutagen in the city…

Don’t miss the next thrilling episode –

Open it!

The older you get, the weirder your injuries. This week painting has been halted thanks to tendinitis in my middle finger. It would be funny if it weren’t so damn sore! 

I had enough pain free movement back by Monday to get the rest of the heroes finished but they are all just base coat, wash and a little of the base colour reapplied to hide tide marks. By the time I got to that stage I had to ice the damn finger again. Bodies are stupid things. 

The game will have to wait until next weekend now but the project was pretty much finished in January. As a reward I bought some mouser bots and a cameraman from Crooked Dice. That’s how backlog clearing works, right???

So I guess the next post will be a battle report…

The dock platform needed some extra colours on it before a wash so on the one dry day we’ve had recently I hit it with a dark grey, brown and black spray cans. The next step was a very watered down black and brown wash (roughly equal parts black and raw sienna craft paint, a little window cleaner and a lot of water). Once applied I went over it with a paper towel and dabbed most of the wash off. This step meant that I didn’t feel the need to drybrush over the top later. 

Now it was time for the wooden pylons. I have a few Contrast paints that I like for wood; for this one I decided to go with Goregrunta Fur. Once that was dry I did a dark wash coat on the lower half to kind of show a waterline and then matched across the concrete with the black wash from the concrete step.  It doesn’t really show in the photos and I may go in later with some Dirty Down Moss to accentuate it.

At this point I was happy with the platforms and the only thing I wanted to do now was a quick drybrush of a deep blue on the mat. It looks much darker in photos than in real life but it was still a little too flat looking for my taste.

With that, the terrain portion of the project is done. When I started this I had no idea that I would build a table (and spend less than a tenner to do it). I don’t normally enjoy working on terrain and it has definitely had moments when it has felt like a chore but I’m really happy with it overall. Everything except the platforms, mat and ship fit into a 4l Really Useful Box so it will be easy enough to store. 

Some homemade dockside bits. As part of digging around in the Toolboxes of Trash that I keep for scratch building, I found these water gun trigger sections. They pull apart really easily and, though the plastic is too soft to file away lines, I carved away what I could and hit them with some black primer. A drybrush of gun metal and then a dark brown sponged on for light weathering and now our ship has something to tie up to. Sadly I don’t have anything right now that looks the right gauge for actually tying up the ship so we’ll all need to use our imaginations for the game.

I also found this old thread bobbin. A quick couple of cuts with my hobby saw and it was better scaled to mini height. Some wires stripped out of an old ethernet cable wire superglued round it and then some black spray primer. Some paint and a wash later, it becomes another bit of dockside scatter.

When I saw that the scenario was around the mutagen that created the turtles, I knew I had the perfect thing in the stash for objective markers. Last year at a show I paid far too much money for three radioactive crates from Modiphius. I made a little mould and cast some extras for this game… but I was impatient and ended up with bubbles. Don’t be like me. I’ll make more in the future to replace them but I wanted these good to go by this coming weekend.

I also have a bunch of GW barrels which I painted a different colour to the objective markers. Once both sets of barrels had base coats, they got a wash of black wash and then a stippled reapplication of their base colour. 

Then, very carefully, I went over all the bits on the objective markers that are meant to show radioactive ooze spilling out with a titanium white, two thin coats applied to get a nice smooth base layer for the Rainforest green paint I put on top. A wash of Bieltan Green and a stipple of the base colour were done to add a bit of depth to the ooze.

Next up I wanted some chain-link fence but looking around in my junk pile… sorry, scratch building supplies, I only had one piece of leftover netting that will work. Folding it in half to check that it would make fence tall enough to look right, I cut it in two and started cutting up kebab skewers for the metal frames. I had to get a  little creative with gluing because I didn’t have any wiggle room for overhang. Using my metal ruler to hold things in place while I used super glue worked well most of the time; a couple of times I added a little extra weight on the ruler too.

I got two full tongue depressor lengths before I ran out. For the third one I had enough for two full panels and with a little bit of excess could make the third panel look like someone had cut through it.

Primed black and then drybrush with a gun metal. For the basing I did concrete texture on one side and muddy ground on the other. A few tufts and they are all done. Not bad for a scrap piece of netting and three tongue depressors happens to be exactly the length of the dock piece. Love it when the universe smiles on us wee hobbyists.

I also painted up a security office from TTCombat. I haven’t got round to the barriers yet but they are in the pile.

Here’s the table as it stands after my unexpected three day weekend. I was going to paint up the MDF building as well but I’ve some more scatter to finish first and might not need it to fill the table after all.

One of the reasons for doing this project is to get bits of terrain out of my pile of shame and painted up. With the red storm warning meaning I had an extra day off work, it was time to bash through a bunch of it.

I’d already built and primed the ship  (with two different colours of spray primer cans to save time)but I did some detail painting and then sponge weathering. All in all, not bad for an mdf kit that had been sitting the stash for several years.

Digging around further I found a bunch of resin pieces that will work nicely for scatter terrain. I was given these by a friend who had them in his collection for years and realised they were just taking up space. He gave them to me probably six or seven years ago at this point… it’s time to do something with them! I added in some of the contents of this box of Walking Dead terrain too. I might come back for the cars later.

After a good bath and basic black prime I went in on them with half a dozen colours. I wanted to be able to paint a bunch all in one sitting on Friday as we were off work thanks to the red storm warning. Everything got a soft tone wash which has left them a bit shiny but, being terrain, they’ll need a good few coats of varnish anyway so I’m bothered too much about that.

Pretty happy with how much got done in a day as it blew a hoolie outside.